The 2 Biggest Influencers of Employee Retention

Organizational
culture plays an integral role in an organization’s talent management
strategy. Without a cultural connection to the employee experience it can lose
the whole “experience” part and can become just a process that we go through to
earn money.

Some companies are just fine with this. These are looked at
as the churn and burn jobs where people go through positions quickly to move up
or move on from in order to make the next buck. It is a relatively simple
approach, but in the end can be a significant money drain on the organization.

Taking a more strategic approach to attracting
the right cultural fit by implementing a strategy to retain and engage
employees helps create a higher level of commitment and profitability. While
the notion of “attract” and “retain” are widely understood, we also need to
keep in mind the importance of creating an authentic and congruent employment
brand that will repel the employees that just won’t fit in the first
place.

Factors affecting employee retention

When it comes to changing jobs, we’ve all been
there and done that. At some point in our work history, we left, we split, we
“stepped out the back, Jack and made a new plan, Stan”. The when and how we did it are vastly
different but the why often comes down to the employee experience

Of the four factors presented above, the two
factors most often discussed that can
directly affect retention in a positive and negative way
are leadership and compensation (pay/benefits). Determining which of these two
factors is more prevalent in your organization as it relates to turn over can
easily be done by examining exit interviews or employee engagement survey data.
Data talks - looking at anything else is too subjective to make any concrete
analysis.

#Leadership & #compensation have the most impact on employee #retention: @lizzpellet

In talent management we intuitively know retention
is the goal in the hiring process and it is built into our talent strategy but
the top two challenges of keeping the best employees come down to:

Leadership (My boss is a jerk)

In a September 2015 article in Entrepreneur magazine, Travis Bradberry states, “Managers
tend to blame their turnover problems on everything under the sun, while
ignoring the crux of the matter: people don’t leave jobs; they leave managers.” And right he is. They leave the leader
for a variety of reasons, but one resounding theme tends to emerge - my boss is
a jerk. Now following that statement we
could plug in many things that make that boss a jerk to one employee while
making him/her endearing to the next, but when you come across a leader that
irks you in some significant way, usually you’ll start looking to move on.

A Gallup study of 7,272 U.S. adults
revealed that one in two had left their job to get away from their manager to
improve their overall life at some point in their career.

Think about your own experience. Have you ever worked
somewhere that at the end of the day had left you thinking how the heck did my boss get their job? Really, how did they end up
in a leadership role when no one respects them, they treat people like robots,
they constantly talk over you, they know nothing about what you really do, but
love to give direction or they hide in the office all day and are just too busy
when you need them? You get the gist here and could probably add 20 more
reasons, but the bottom line is, your boss is a jerk.

Image credit: Devil Wears Prada | Twentieth
Century Fox

Compensation (They don’t pay me enough to
put up with this stuff)

They
say money can’t buy love or happiness which may be true, but it also doesn’t
buy you loyal employees. You cannot pay for loyalty, even though many
organizations think money drives retention, the statistics and intuition tell
us differently.

Pay
and benefits are a driver to many individuals and to some people the extrinsic
benefits of the organization can outweigh the intrinsic benefits. Employees can
withstand and overlook things when they feel highly compensated, but when they
feel they are under paid, (read underappreciated here), there is a lot less toleration. While there are many statistics that state deciding to
stay at a job is not just about the money, oftentimes it’s the irritants that
employees deal with on a daily basis that force them to look elsewhere. And
when those irritants get annoying enough, employees will say, they just don’t pay me enough to put up with
this stuff.

Other factors influencing
the compensation process

Organizational
dynamics and culture also play a big role in the compensation process. Have you
ever worked an entire year only to learn that the profitability of the company
wasn’t healthy, so no one is getting a
raise? It
happens and it lends itself to a decision to stay or move on. If you are
marketable, you start to look at options.
You know, business is business so you don’t take it personally. But, if
you’ve ever worked at an organization where raises are given “across the board”
regardless of individual contribution, well “business is business” has a much
different effect on retention. The reality of these situations happens all too
often, but the travesty is you may have had to wait an entire year to hear the
news.

There
is no magic formula for retention that yields a high level of dedication and
commitment from your workforce, but culture can be nurtured to mitigate these
two reasons that people leave and can create a higher desire to stay on.

Attracting, Retaining, and Repelling

Best-practices for recruitment: how to attract, retain and repel the right employees

Attracting, Retaining, and Repelling

By Lizz Pellet, Guest Contributor

Lizz is a Fellow in Organizational Transformation from Johns Hopkins University and a well-known thought leader in talent management. She is currently VP of Educational Sales at The Sourcing Institute. Lizz can be reached at Lizzpellet [at] gmail [dot] com.